Like other phenomena of the '80s, Steve Jobs was supposed to be long
gone by now. After the spectacular rise of Apple, which went from a
garage startup to a $1.4 billion company in just eight years, the
Entrepreneur of the Decade (as one magazine anointed him in 1989) tried
to do it all again with a new company called NeXT. He was going to
build the next generation of the personal computer, a machine so
beautiful, so powerful, so insanely great, it would put Apple to shame.
It didn't happen. After eight long years of struggle and after running
through some $250 million, NeXT closed down its hardware division last
year and laid off more than 200 employees. It seemed only a matter of
time until the whole thing collapsed and Jobs disappeared into
hyperspace.

But it turns out that Jobs isn't as far gone as some techno-pundits
thought. There are big changes coming in software development -- and
Jobs, of all people, is trying to lead the way. This time the Holy
Grail is object-oriented programming; some have compared the effect it
will have on the production of software to the effect the industrial
revolution had on manufactured goods. "In my 20 years in this industry,
I have never seen a revolution as profound as this," says Jobs, with
characteristic understatement. "You can build software literally five
to 10 times faster, and that software is much more reliable, much
easier to maintain and much more powerful."

Of course, this being Silicon Valley, there is always a new
revolution to hype. And to hear it coming from Jobs -- Mr. Revolution
himself -- is bound to raise some eyebrows. "Steve is a little like the
boy who cried wolf," says Robert Cringely, a columnist at Info World, a
PC industry newsweekly. "He has cried revolution one too many times.
People still listen to him, but now they're more skeptical." And even
if object-oriented software does take off, Jobs may very well end up a
minor figure rather than the flag-waving leader of the pack he clearly
sees himself as.

Whatever role Jobs ends up playing, there is no question
evolutionary forces will soon reshape the software industry. Since the
Macintosh changed the world 10 years ago with its brilliant
point-and-click interface, all the big leaps in computer evolution have
been on the hardware side. Machines have gotten smaller, faster and
cheaper. Software, by contrast, has gotten bigger, more complicated and
much more expensive to produce. Writing a new spreadsheet or
word-processing program these days is a tedious process, like building
a skyscraper out of toothpicks. Object-oriented programming will change
that. To put it simply, it will allow gigantic, complex programs to be
assembled like Tinkertoys. Instead of starting from the ground up every
time, layering in one line of code after another, programmers will be
able to use preassembled chunks to build 80 percent of a program, thus
saving an enormous amount of time and money. Because these objects will
work with a wide range of interfaces and applications, they will also
eliminate many of the compatibility problems that plague traditional
software.

For now, the beneficiary of all this is corporate America, which
needs powerful custom software to help manage huge databases on its
networks. Because of the massive hardware requirements for
object-oriented software, it will be years before it becomes practical
for small businesses and individual users (decent performance out of
NeXT's software on a 486/Pentium processor, for example, requires 24
megs of RAM and 200 megs on a hard drive). Still, in the long run,
object-oriented software will vastly simplify the task of writing
programs, eventually making it accessible even to folks without degrees
from MIT

No one disputes the fact that NeXT has a leg up on this new
technology. Unlike most of its competitors, whose object-oriented
software is still in the prototype stage, NEXTSTEP (NeXT's operating
system software) has been out in the real world for several years. It's
been roadtested, revised, refined, and it is, by all accounts, a solid
piece of work. Converts include McCaw Cellular, Swiss Bank and Chrysler
Financial. But as the overwhelming success of Microsoft has shown, the
company with the best product doesn't always win. For NeXT to succeed,
it will have to go up against two powerhouses: Taligent, the new
partnership of Apple and IBM, and Bill Gates and his $4 billion-a-year
Microsoft steamroller. "Right now, it's a horse race between those
three companies," says Esther Dyson, a Silicon Valley marketing guru. A
recent $10 million deal with Sun Microsystems -- the workstation
company that was once NeXT's arch rival -- has breathed new life into
NeXT, but it is only one step in a very long journey. Still, few dare
count NeXT out.

Today, Jobs, 39, seems eager to distance himself from his
reputation as the Wunderkind of the '80s. He wears small, round John
Lennon-style glasses now, and his boyish face is hidden behind a
shaggy, Left Bank-poet beard. During our interview at the NeXT offices
in Redwood City, Calif., just 20 miles north of his old Apple fiefdom,
he took particular joy in bashing his old rival Bill Gates but avoided
discussing other heavyweights by name. Trademark Jobsian phrases like
"insanely great" or "the next big thing" were nowhere to be found.
Friends say the Sturm und Drang of the past few years has humbled Jobs
ever so slightly; he is a devoted family man now, and on weekends, he
can often be seen Rollerblading with his wife and two kids through the
streets of Palo Alto. "Remember, this is a guy who never believed any
of the rules applied to him," one colleague says. "Now, I think he's
finally realized that he's mortal, just like the rest of us."

It's been 10 years since the Macintosh was introduced. When you
look around at the technological landscape today, what's most
surprising to you?

People say sometimes, "You work in the fastest-moving industry in
the world." I don't feel that way. I think I work in one of the
slowest. It seems to take forever to get anything done. All of the
graphical-user interface stuff that we did with the Macintosh was
pioneered at Xerox PARC [the company's legendary Palo Alto Research
Center] and with Doug Engelbart at SRI [a future-oriented think tank at
Stanford] in the mid-'70s. And here we are, just about the mid-'90s,
and it's kind of commonplace now. But it's about a 10-to-20-year lag.
That's a long time.

The reason for that is, it seems to take a very unique combination
of technology, talent, business and marketing and luck to make
significant change in our industry. It hasn't happened that often.

The other interesting thing is that, in general, business tends to
be the fueling agent for these changes. It's simply because they have a
lot of money. They're willing to pay money for things that will save
them money or give them new capabilities. And that's a hard one
sometimes, because a lot of the people who are the most creative in
this business aren't doing it because they want to help corporate
America.

A perfect example is the PDA [Personal Digital Assistant] stuff,
like Apple's Newton. I'm not real optimistic about it, and I'll tell
you why. Most of the people who developed these PDAs developed them
because they thought individuals were going to buy them and give them
to their families. My friends started General Magic [a new company that
hopes to challenge the Newton]. They think your kids are going to have
these, your grandmother's going to have one, and you're going to all
send messages. Well, at $1,500 a pop with a cellular modem in them, I
don't think too many people are going to buy three or four for their
family. The people who are going to buy them in the first five years
are mobile professionals.

And the problem is, the psychology of the people who develop these
things is just not going to enable them to put on suits and hop on
planes and go to Federal Express and pitch their product.

To make step-function changes, revolutionary changes, it takes that
combination of technical acumen and business and marketing -- and a
culture that can somehow match up the reason you developed your product
and the reason people will want to buy it. I have a great respect for
incremental improvement, and I've done that sort of thing in my life,
but I've always been attracted to the more revolutionary changes. I
don't know why. Because they're harder. They're much more stressful
emotionally. And you usually go through a period where everybody tells
you that you've completely failed.

Is that the period you're emerging from now?

I hope so. I've been there before, and I've recently been there again.

As you know, most of what I've done in my career has been software.
The Apple II wasn't much software, but the Mac was just software in a
cool box. We had to build the box because the software wouldn't run on
any other box, but nonetheless, it was mainly software. I was involved
in PostScript and the formation of Adobe, and that was all software.
And what we've done with NEXTSTEP is really all software. We tried to
sell it in a really cool box, but we learned a very important lesson.
When you ask people to go outside of the mainstream, they take a risk.
So there has to be some important reward for taking that risk or else
they won't take it.

What we learned was that the reward can't be one and a half times
better or twice as good. That's not enough. The reward has to be like
three or four or five times better to take the risk to jump out of the
mainstream.

The problem is, in hardware you can't build a computer that's twice
as good as anyone else's anymore. Too many people know how to do it.
You're lucky if you can do one that's one and a third times better or
one and a half times better. And then it's only six months before
everybody else catches up. But you can do it in software. As a matter
of fact, I think that the leap that we've made is at least five years
ahead of anybody.

Let's talk about the evolution of the PC. About 30 percent of
American homes have computers. Businesses are wired. Video-game
machines are rapidly becoming as powerful as PCs and in the near future
will he able to do everything that traditional desktop computers can
do. Is the PC revolution over?

No. Well, I don't know exactly what you mean by your question, but
I think that the PC revolution is far from over. What happened with the
Mac was -- well, first I should tell you my theory about Microsoft.
Microsoft has had two goals in the last 10 years. One was to copy the
Mac, and the other was to copy Lotus' success in the spreadsheet --
basically, the applications business. And over the course of the last
10 years, Microsoft accomplished both of those goals. And now they are
completely lost.

They were able to copy the Mac because the Mac was frozen in time.
The Mac didn't change much for the last 10 years. It changed maybe 10
percent. It was a sitting duck. It's amazing that it took Microsoft 10
years to copy something that was a sitting duck.

Apple, unfortunately, doesn't deserve too much sympathy. They
invested hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars into R&D, but
very little came out. They produced almost no new innovation since the
original Mac itself.

So now, the original genes of the Macintosh have populated the
earth. Ninety percent in the form of Windows, but nevertheless, there
are tens of millions of computers that work like that. And that's
great. The question is, what's next? And what's going to keep driving
this PC revolution?

If you look at the goal of the '80s, it was really individual
productivity And that could be answered with shrink-wrapped
applications [off-the-shelf software]. If you look at the goal of the
'90s -- well, if you look at the personal computer, it's going from
being a tool of computation to a tool of communication. It's going from
individual productivity to organizational productivity and also
operational productivity. What I mean by that is, the market for
main-frame and minicomputers is still as large as the PC market. And
people don't buy those things to run shrink-wrapped spreadsheets and
word processors on. They buy them to run applications that automate the
heart of their company. And they don't buy these applications
shrink-wrapped. You can't go buy an application to run your hospital,
to do derivatives commodities trading or to run your phone network.
They don't exist. Or if they do, you have to customize them so much
that they're really custom apps by the time you get through with them.

These custom applications really used to just be in the back office
-- in accounting, manufucturing. But as business is getting much more
sophisticated and consumers are expecting more and more, these custom
apps have invaded the front office. Now, when a company has a new
product, it consists of only three things: an idea, a sales channel and
a custom app to implement the product. The company doesn't implement
the product by hand anymore or service it by hand. Without the custom
app, it doesn't have the new product or service. I'll give you an
example. MCI's Friends and Family is the most successful business
promotion done in the last decade -- measured in dollars and cents.
AT&T did not respond to that for 18 months. It cost them billions
of dollars. Why didn't they? They're obviously smart guys. They didn't
because they couldn't create a custom app to run a new billing system.

So how does this connect with the next generation of the PC?

I believe the next generation of the PC is going to be driven by
much more advanced software, and it's going to be driven by custom
software for business. Business has focused on shrink-wrapped software
on the PCs, and that's why PCs haven't really touched the heart of the
business. And now they want to bring them into the heart of the
business, and everyone is going to have to run custom apps alongside
their shrink-wrapped apps because that's how the enterprise is going to
get their competitive advantage in things.

For example, McCaw Cellular, the largest cellular provider in the
world, runs the whole front end of their business on NEXTSTEP now.
They're giving PCs with custom apps to the phone dealers so that when
you buy a cellular phone, it used to take you a day and a half to get
you up on the network. Now it takes five minutes. The phone dealer just
runs these custom apps, they're networked back to a server in Seattle,
and in a minute and a half, with no human intervention, your phone
works on the entire McCaw network.

In addition to that, the applications business right now -- if you
look at even the shrinkwrap business -- is contracting dramatically. It
now takes 100 to 200 people one to two years just to do a major
revision to a word processor or spreadsheet. And so, all the really
creative people who like to work in small teams of three, four, five
people, they've all been squeezed out of that business. As you may
know, Windows is the worst development environment ever made. And
Microsoft doesn't have any interest in making it better, because the
fact that it's really hard to develop apps in Windows plays to
Microsoft's advantage. You can't have small teams of programmers
writing word processors and spreadsheets -- it might upset their
competitive advantage. And they can afford to have 200 people working
on a project, no problem.

With our technology, with objects, literally three people in a
garage can blow away what 200 people at Microsoft can do. Literally can
blow it away. Corporate America has a need that is so huge and can save
them so much money, or make them so much money, or cost them so much
money if they miss it, that they are going to fuel the object
revolution.

That may he so. But when people think of Steve Jobs, they think
of the man whose mission was to bring technology to the masses -- not
to corporate America.

Well, life is always a little more complicated than it appears to be.

What drove the success of the Apple II for many years and let
consumers have the benefit of that product was Visi-Calc selling into
corporate America. Corporate America was buying Apple IIs and running
Visi-Calc on them like crazy so that we could get our volumes up and
our prices down and sell that as a consumer product on Mondays and
Wednesdays and Fridays while selling it to business on Tuesdays and
Thursdays. We were giving away Macintoshes to higher ed while we were
selling them for a nice profit to corporate America. So it takes both.

What's going to fuel the object revolution is not the consumer. The
consumer is not going to see the benefits until after business sees
them and we begin to get this stuff into volume. Because unfortunately,
people are not rebelling against Microsoft. They don't know any better.
They're not sitting around thinking that they have a giant problem that
needs to be solved -- whereas corporations are. The PC market has done
less and less to serve their growing needs. They have a giant need, and
they know it. We don't have to spend money educating them about the
problem -- they know they have a problem. There's a giant vacuum
sucking us in there, and there's a lot of money in there to fuel the
development of this object industry. And everyone will benefit from
that.

I visited Xerox PARC in 1979, when I was at Apple. That visit's
been written about -- it was a very important visit. I remember being
shown their rudimentary graphical-user interface. It was incomplete,
some of it wasn't even right, but the germ of the idea was there. And
within 10 minutes, it was so obvious that every computer would work
this way someday. You knew it with every bone in your body. Now, you
could argue about the number of years it would take, you could argue
about who the winners and losers in terms of companies in the industry
might be, but I don't think rational people could argue that every
computer would work this way someday.

I feel the same way about objects, with every bone in my body. All
software will be written using this object technology someday. No
question about it. You can argue about how many years it's going to
take, you can argue who the winners and losers are going to be in terms
of the companies in this industry, but I don't think a rational person
can argue that all software will not be built this way.

Would you explain, in simple terms, exactly what object-oriented software is?

Objects are like people. They're living, breathing things that have
knowledge inside them about how to do things and have memory inside
them so they can remember things. And rather than interacting with them
at a very low level, you interact with them at a very high level of
abstraction, like we're doing right here.

Here's an example: If I'm your laundry object, you can give me your
dirty clothes and send me a message that says, "Can you get my clothes
laundered, please." I happen to know where the best laundry place in
San Francisco is. And I speak English, and I have dollars in my
pockets. So I go out and hail a taxicab and tell the driver to take me
to this place in San Francisco. I go get your clothes laundered, I jump
back in the cab, I get back here. I give you your clean clothes and
say' "Here are your clean clothes."

You have no idea how I did that. You have no knowledge of the
laundry place. Maybe you speak French, and you can't even hail a taxi.
You can't pay for one, you don't have dollars in your pocket. Yet I
knew how to do all of that. And you didn't have to know any of it. All
that complexity was hidden inside of me, and we were able to interact
at a very high level of abstraction. That's what objects are. They
encapsulate complexity, and the interfaces to that complexity are high
level

You brought up Microsoft earlier. How do you feel about the fact
that Bill Gates has essentially achieved dominance in the software
industry with what amounts to your vision of how personal computers
should work?

I don't really know what that all means. If you say, well, how do
you feel about Bill Gates getting rich off some of the ideas that we
had ... well, you know, the goal is not to be the richest man in the
cemetery. It's not my goal anyway.

The thing I don't think is good is that I don't believe Microsoft
has transformed itself into an agent for improving things, an agent for
coming up with the next revolution. The Japanese, for example, used to
be accused of just copying -- and indeed, in the beginning, that's just
what they did. But they got quite a bit more sophisticated and started
to innovate -- look at automobiles, they certainly innovated quite a
bit there. I can't say the same thing about Microsoft.

And I become very concerned, because I see Microsoft competing very
fiercely and putting a lot of companies out of business -- some
deservedly so and others not deservedly so. And I see a lot of
innovation leaving this industry. What I believe very strongly is that
the industry absolutely needs an alternative to Microsoft. And it needs
an alternative to Microsoft in the applications area -- which I hope
will be Lotus. And we also need an alternative to Microsoft in the
systems-software area. And the only hope we have for that, in my
opinion, is NeXT.

Microsoft, of course, is working on their own object-oriented operating system.

They were working on the Mac for 10 years, too. I'm sure they're working on it.

Microsoft's greatest asset is Windows. Their greatest liability is
Windows. Windows is so non-object-oriented that it's going to be
impossible for them to go back and become object-oriented without
throwing Windows away, and they can't do that for years. So they're
going to try to patch things on top, and it's not going to work.

You've called Microsoft the IBM of the '90s. What exactly do you mean by that?

They're the mainstream. And a lot of people who don't want to think
about it too much are just going to buy their product. They have a
market dominance now that is so great that it's actually hurting the
industry. I don't like to get into discussions about whether they
accomplished that fairly or not. That's for others to decide. I just
observe it and say it's not healthy for the country.

What do you think of the federal anti-trust investigation?

I don't have enough data to know. And again, the issue is not
whether they accomplished what they did within the rule book or by
breaking some of the rules. I'm not qualified to say. But I don't think
it matters. I don't think that's the real issue. The real issue is,
America is leading the world in software technology right now, and that
is such a valuable asset for this country that anything that
potentially threatens that leadership needs to be examined. I think the
Microsoft monopoly of both sectors of the software industry -- both the
system and the applications software and the potential third sector
that they want to monopolize, which is the consumer set-top-box sector
-- is going to pose the greatest threat to America's dominance in the
software industry of anything I have ever seen and could ever think of.
I personally believe that it would be in the best interest of the
country to break Microsoft up into three companies -- a
systems-software company, an applications-software company and a
consumer-software company.

Hearing you talk like this makes me flash back to the old Apple
days, when Apple cast itself in the role of the rebel against the
establishment. Except now, instead of IBM, the great evil is Microsoft.
And instead of Apple that will save us, it's NeXT. Do you see parallels
here, too?

Yeah, I do. Forget about me. That's not important. What's important
is, I see tremendous parallels between the solidity and dominance that
IBM had and the shackles that that was imposing on our industry and
what Microsoft is doing .....I think we came closer than we think to
losing some of our computer industry in the late '70s and early '80s,
and I think the gradual dissolution of IBM has been the healthiest
thing that's happened in this industry in the last 10 years.

What's your personal relationship with Bill Gates like?

I think Bill Gates is a good guy. We're not best friends, but we talk maybe once a month.

A lot has been made of the rivalry between you two. The two golden boys of the computer

revolution.

I think Bill and I have very different value systems. I like Bill
very much, and I certainly admire his accomplishments, but the
companies we built were very different from each other.

A lot of people believe that given the stranglehold Microsoft
has on the software business, in the long run, the best NeXT can hope
for is that it will be a niche product.

Apple's a niche product, the Mac was a niche product. And yet look
at what it did. Apple's, what, a $9 billion company. It was $2 billion
when I left. They're doing OK. Would I be happy if we had a 10 percent
market share of the system-software business? I'd be happy now. I'd be
very happy. Then I'd go work like crazy to get 20.

You mentioned the Apple earlier. When you look at the company you founded now, what do you think?

I don't want to talk about Apple.

What about the PowerPC?

It works fine. It's a Pentium. The PowerPC and the Pentium are
equivalent, plus or minus 10 or 20 percent, depending on which day you
measure them. They're the same thing. So Apple has a Pentium. That's
good. Is it three or four or five times better? No. Will it ever be?
No. But it beats being behind. Which was where the Motorola 68000
architecture was unfortunately being relegated. It keeps them at least
equal, but it's not a compelling advantage.

You can't open the paper these days without reading about the
Internet and the information superhighway. Where is this all going?

The Internet is nothing new. It has been happening for 10 years.
Finally, now, the wave is cresting on the general computer user. And I
love it. I think the den is far more interesting than the living room.
Putting the Internet into people's houses is going to be really what
the information superhighway is all about, not digital convergence in
the set-top box. All that's going to do is put the video rental stores
out of business and save me a trip to rent my movie. I'm not very
excited about that. I'm not excited about home shopping. I'm very
excited about having the Internet in my den.

Phone companies, cable companies and Hollywood are jumping all
over each other trying to get a piece of the action. Who do you think
will be the winners and losers, say, five years down the road?

I've talked to some of these guys in the phone and cable business,
and believe me, they have no idea what they're doing here. And the
people who are talking the loudest know the least.

Who are you referring to -- John Malone?

I don't want to name names. Let me just say that, in general, they
have no idea how difficult this is going to be and how long it is going
to take. None of these guys understands computer science. They don't
understand that that's a little computer that they're going to have in
the set-top box, and in order to run that computer, they're going to
have to come up with some very sophisticated software.

Let's talk more about the Internet. Every month, it's growing by
leaps and bounds. How is this new communications web going to affect
the way we live in the future?

I don't think it's too good to talk about these kinds of things.
You can open up any book and hear all about this kind of garbage.

I'm interested in hearing your ideas.

I don't think of the world that way. I'm a tool builder. That's how
I think of myself. I want to build really good tools that I know in my
gut and my heart will be valuable. And then whatever happens is ... you
can't really predict exactly what will happen, but you can feel the
direction that we're going. And that's about as close as you can get.
Then you just stand back and get out of the way, and these things take
on a life of their own.

Nevertheless, you've often talked about how technology can
empower people, how it can change their lives. Do you still have as
much faith in technology today as you did when you started out 20 years
ago?

Oh, sure. It's not a faith in technology. It's faith in people.

Explain that.

Technology is nothing. What's important is that you have a faith in
people, that they're basically good and smart, and if you give them
tools, they'll do wonderful things with them. It's not the tools that
you have faith in -- tools are just tools. They work, or they don't
work. It's people you have faith in or not. Yeah, sure, I'm still
optimistic. I mean, I get pessimistic sometimes but not for long.

It's heen 10 years since the PC revolution started. Rational
people can debate about whether technology has made the world a better
place.

The world's clearly a better place. Individuals can now do things that only large groups of people

with lots of money could do before. What that means is, we have much
more opportunity for people to get to the marketplace -- not just the
marketplace of commerce but the marketplace of ideas. The marketplace
of publications, the marketplace of public policy. You name it. We've
given individuals and small groups equally powerful tools to what the
largest, most heavily funded organizations in the world have. And that
trend is going to continue. You can buy for under $10,000 today a
computer that is just as powerful, basically, as one anyone in the
world can get their hands on.

The second thing that we've done is the communications side of it.
By creating this electronic web, we have flattened out again the
difference between the lone voice and the very large organized voice.
We have allowed people who are not part of an organization to
communicate and pool their interests and thoughts and energies together
and start to act as if they were a virtual organization.

So I think this technology has been extremely rewarding. AndI don't think it's anywhere near over.

When you were talking about Bill Gates, you said that the goal is not to be the richest guy in the cemetery. What is the goal?

I don't know how to answer you. In the broadest context, the goal
is to seek enlightenment -- however you define it. But these are
private things. I don't want to talk about this kind of stuff

Why?

I think, especially when one is somewhat in the public eye, it's very important to keep a private life.

Are you uncomfortable with your status as a celebrity in Silicon Valley?

I think of it as my well-known twin brother. It's not me. Because
otherwise, you go crazy. You read some negative article some idiot
writes about you -- you just can't take it too personally. But then
that teaches you not to take the really great ones too personally
either. People like symbols, and they write about symbols.

I talked to some of the original Mac designers the other day,
and they mentioned the 10-year-annniversary celebration of the Mac a
few months ago. You didn't want to participate in that. Has it been a
burden, the pressure to repeat the phenomenal success of the Mac? Some
people have compared you to Orson Welles, who at 25 did his best work,
and it's all downhill from there.

I'm very flattered by that, actually. I wonder what game show I'm
going to be on. Guess I'm going to have to start eating a lot of pie.
[Laughs.]

I don't know. The Macintosh was sort of like this wonderful romance
in your life that you once had -- and that produced about 10 million
children. In a way it will never be over in your life. You'll still
smell that romance every morning when you get up. And when you open the
window, the cool air will hit your face, and you'll smell that romance
in the air. And you'll see your children around, and you feel good abou